Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 4, 1990                   TAG: 9004040616
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LITHUANIANS BEND; WILL GORBACHEV?

Clearly, he and his supporters understand that maintaining an empire is something the U.S.S.R. simply cannot afford. With astonishing speed, and with the Kremlin's tolerance and even active assistance, the old Warsaw Pact satellites are spinning free of the communist orbit.

Just as clearly, however, Gorbachev will not countenance with equal equanimity the breakup of the Soviet Union itself. The first freely elected Lithuanian parliament in decades has declared Lithuania to be an independent republic. But in Moscow's eyes, Lithuania - however odious may have been its annexation by Stalin, at the beginning of World War II when Stalin still was Hitler's buddy - has become an integral part of the Soviet Union. In Moscow's eyes, Lithuania cannot secede so easily as that.

Lithuania, and her sister Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia, can make a powerful case for independence. They are not historically part of greater Russia. Even the Soviet government now acknowledges the pact with Hitler that allowed their annexation to have been illegal. Independence movements in the Baltic states have been peaceful and democratic; they have not triggered violence against minorities, mainly ethnic Russians.

Yet Moscow's "liberals," perhaps seeing Lithuania's devotion to its own nationalist agenda as a hindrance to reform efforts throughout the Soviet Union, have not jumped to the defense of Lithuanian independence. And Gorbachev's fear that a breakup of the Soviet Union could bring great harm to the 60 million Soviet citizens not living in their ancestral lands may be more than empty rhetoric.

Even in the Baltic states, a disquietingly intense sense of ethnic self-consciousness seems inseparable from the quest for national "self-determination." Far grimmer has been the situation in the Caucasus. There, Soviet troops have had to quell violent riots in Azerbaijan - riots initially directed not against the authorities but against ethnic Armenians living among the Azerbaijani.

The Caucasus is not the Baltic; the Baltic is not the Ukraine; and on and on. But allowing a peaceful and democratic Lithuania to secede unilaterally might well serve to encourage ethnic resistance elsewhere in the Soviet Union that would be neither peaceful nor democratic. The moral, intellectual and economic bankruptcy of communism is stripping the Soviet Union of any semblance of a unifying institution, and is baring old ethnic passions that have lain dormant beneath the veneer of official ideology.

Recently, the Lithuanian leadership has softened its independence talk and has asked for negotiations with Moscow. On Monday night, President Vytautas Landsbergis said Lithuanians never expected power to be "handed over the very next day." The presence of Soviet firepower tends to concentrate the mind, of course, but the softer line also might be interpreted as Lithuanian appreciation of Gorbachev's dicey position.

Whatever the cause, the upshot is that the Lithuanians appear to have given Gorbachev room for maneuvering: No longer are his options limited to either (a) immediate recognition of Lithunianan independence or (b) ruthless repression.

With his war of nerves against Lithuania, Gorbachev had started on the road toward the second option. If he does not now turn back, the West should make clear to him, he'll have exhausted his credit.